End of the road?

I started blogging two and a half years ago, when we had just moved in to our new house and were experiencing localized power cuts (yes, only in our house) due to our landlord's ignorance (greediness) to install an electric meter. Since that time I have made posts about, well, everything. Be it things which have been going on in my life, technology, bikes, movies, railway stations .. and a whole lot more rubbish. All of those posts contain the best part of my life: My college days.
But now, I just don't feel like it. I don't have the handy blogger button which I just click and type whatever I wish like. In fact, few times, I have tried posting something just for the heck of it but backed off at the last moment. The last post was one time when I didn't and it resulted in a post which I don't like anymore.
Its not about the time. I think I have enough. I like writing. I think its' because of this blog that I really started liking it. But, nowadays, I just don't feel like doing it. And hence, this blog is officially closed. I may start again, who knows? But till then it is goodluck and goodbye.

Note: The author reserves the right to change the above statement without prior notice.

Here I am!

F*ck Bryan Adams! I'm back. This must have been the longest I have gone without doing a blog post. Like what.. one and a half months? So what was I doing in that gap you ask.. or maybe you don't ask, but I tell you anyway.
I had been covering mile after mile ... nah .. kilometer after kilometer on my bike. At the current day it stands at 1245 KM without me falling off it (touch wood).
I have been watching movies. In fact I saw one yesterday night at 10PM at PVR. It was called "Parzania" and I would give it a big thumbs up. I also saw "Guru", but it is just of average grade.
Then I went for this trek at some place called "Thadiandamol" in Coorg district. It was a one day affair where we walked, walked, walked and ate maggi at the end of the day.
Other than that, I'm quite occupied these days (not just with work) and that is my excuse for not writing anything for sooo many day. I hope I can get to write something more captivating next time. Cheerios till then.

Vroom

I got meself a new toy :-)

Don't look at the antenna

The scene is set. It is a crowded mall on a Saturday evening. I'm
wandering aimlessly in the mall awaiting the arrival of my cousin. I
see a "Tata Sky" booth. A sales boy and girl are standing next to the
stall. I approach the booth.

Me: Hi, what is the subscription charge of this thing.

Boy: 300 bucks a month.

Me: Oh!

Girl: Yeah, its 300 bucks plus 4 grand for the installation.

Me: Oh!

Boy: Yes, you have this small antenna which you have to put up in the
terrace (gives a pamphlet with a picture of a small dish antenna).

Me: (declines the pamphlet after a cursory glance) OK, so it works on
the principle of line of sight (pointing at the antenna).

Girl: No no.. you don't have to look at it for it to work.

Me: (lifts eyebrow) Hmmm .. Thank you. (controls laugh, leaves)

English bollywood movie

HBO has been showing runs of the movie: American Ninja. If you do get the time, please do watch it. You would feel as if a Hindi movie has been dubbed into English. The following dialogue has been lifted from IMDB:

Black Star ninja: Who is he?
Colonel Hickock: He's a new recruit, he just got here yesterday. I don't even know his name!
Black Star ninja: He posses great skills!

And of course its an insult to all the marshal arts movies ever made.

Dhoom 2 review

OK, so this other day there was a company outing for the movie Dhoom-2 !! After watching the movie I realized that "Times of India" had given it a biased review, 4 stars, by a large scale. I would have given it 2.
The story has numerous loose ends. The action is not out of this world (these days I despise stunts with cables. I mean c'mon, people don't somersault and land on their feet after getting punched on their chins.). Ash and Bipasha look good but I felt like slapping them when they opened their mouths. You feel like slapping Uday Chopra when you look at him, but is quite funny when he opens his mouth. Abhishek Bacchan is pissed off during the entire movie. Hrithik Roshan is "sophisticated" .. I mean you have to be if you are the "perfect thief" of the world and want to write an "A" on the whole world. But above all, the movie doesn't have the amount of bike stunts which I would have liked to have. And yes.. the whole movie is filled with scenes where the actors/actresses walk ... and oh how they walk.. in style.
In normal life, when you walk you can hardly do it in style. There are various things which you need to be aware of. The bird which likes to bomb you with its morning payload. The paan chewing auto-rickshaw wala who will invariably spit when you walk past. The sweepers directing the dust of the streets in to your face. Due to all these things, you have to walk fast, dodge, duck and sometimes shout.
But in movies, you walk in slow motion. You have your soundtrack playing in the background. You may even have dancers doing somersaults in the background. Balloons going up in the air. Fireworks all around.
But apart from all that the only good thing which I found about the whole movie was the make up. Now that is really good and maybe.. just maybe for that it is worth watching once.

My first test ride

After days of procrastination I finally decided to test ride a bike. The reason for the delay, more than my laziness, was the fact that I'm a beginner when it comes to riding a bike (note: I'm an expert pillion rider though B-) ) So when I left from office the agenda was to try out a Pulsar 150 or Avenger, but we somehow landed up in a Hero Honda showroom and there lay CBZ-Xtreme. First impression is that the bike does look good. It has got LED tail lights, black alloys, black engine, the smiling grid of the old CBZ in front, 1 down 4 up gear shifts and a 63K on road price tag.
And then came the main course. The time I was supposed to test ride the bike. People who have driven vehicles with gears will tell you that of the many embarrassing things in life, stalling the vehicle after starting and putting it in the first gear comes on top. Yes.. you guessed it right, thats exactly what happened with me. Not once, not twice, but a grand three times and the bike had moved roughly 12 inches. So apart from insulting myself, I also managed to insult the 149 cc pulsar by making it move slower than an old snail.
Well.. life goes on and I'm still stuck on neutral.

Temptation Vs Practicality

Vs

I have spent the last week debating with myself and some of my unfortunate friends on the above issue: Which one to buy?

Tiny grasshopper

Power to Wii.

Proof by oddity

Got this the last time I ran fortune.

Proof techniques #2: Proof by Oddity.
SAMPLE: To prove that horses have an infinite number of legs.
(1) Horses have an even number of legs.
(2) They have two legs in back and fore legs in front.
(3) This makes a total of six legs, which certainly is an odd number
legs for a horse.
(4) But the only number that is both odd and even is infinity.
(5) Therefore, horses must have an infinite number of legs.

Topics is be covered in future issues include proof by:
Intimidation
Gesticulation (handwaving)
"Try it; it works"
Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...)
Blatant assertion
Changing all the 2's to n's
Mutual consent
Lack of a counterexample, and
"It stands to reason"

T-Shirt folding machine

More 360 bashing

By the way my previous 360 review doesn't hold. It seems that the game on demo is rendered only at a paltry resolution of 600x600 (info courtesy Rahul). Don't know why the Microsoft guys made such a dumb move.

Me Delhi trip

I somehow managed to sneak around 12 days of holidays (begging and borrowing from here and there) and went to Delhi on Diwali. Few of the highlights of the trip include:

• Getting a bird's eye view of Diwali from up above the clouds. I'm not much of a cracker burster so I didn't miss doing that and yes if I had done it then I would probably be behind bars right now. By the way the aerial veridct is that the Delhi Diwali was much more festive and polluting than the Bangalore one.
• A defunct school reunion which happened on the next day I landed. I don't blame anyone, but it was a failure.
  
• I have gained a more than passing interest in income tax, mutual funds and the stock market. Reason being: I hate channel surfing and my PC was down, so this was the next best thing to do.
  
• I attended a rock concert (courtesty Rakesh) and didn't quite enjoy it that much. First, I hadn't heard a single song which the bands were playing (given that they were Indian and I don't listen to heavy metal) and second I couldn't grasp a single word they were saying (given that they were Indian and I don't listen to heavy metal). One new revelation which did come out of it was that of the Mosh Pit. If you are even .000093 % sane you won't be in one.
  
• Finally, Air-Deccan can't be relied upon to take you anywhere on time. You may reach before time or after time but never on.
  

Long shot

I have spent a major portion of my college life playing multiplayer games on our LAN (ah.. those memorable days, afternoons, nights.) and arguably I was the best in house. Yes I was beaten many times, but my win percent was always high.
Anyway, anyone who is a gamer knows the value of a sniper. Be it when you are on top of the tower in "CTF-Face" (Unreal Tournament) or when you have the AWP in your hands in "Dust" (Counter Strike) You will be the most hated person by the opposition and the most valued by people (bots??) on your side. Anshul even prided in calling himself "Sniper-Krishna", because there was once a time when no one could get rid of him while playing in CTF-Face. That is no one ... other than me B-)
And then there are the classic snipers from the movies: "Saving Private Ryan", "Enemy at the gates", "Phone booth", "Behind enemy lines" (yes there is a very short sniper sequence during the end of the movie and we have watched it enough times to notice), "Band of brothers", all highly coveted positions. Of course of the lot the best sniper (according to me and Anshul) is the one in "Saving Private Ryan".

So, now having ascertained that we are huge sniper fans, when someone shows me this, my reaction is: "Damn! I got to have that thing."

Quick link thrown in as an after thought: Making your breakfast more interesting.

Ehh.. 3 more

Two movies and one gaming console. Here goes:

Pyar Ke Side Effects
Pros: Witty dialogs, Mallika Sherawat's acting.
Cons: The movie drags on a bit too much, Mallik Sherawat's acting.
Verdict: Average

Dor
Pros: Shreyas Talpade stands out! His mimicry is a refreshing change. Everything else.
Cons: None
Verdict: Damn good!

XBox-360

Ok this one won't be like the above two, because its not a movie and because I'm a computer guy.

The XBox-360 is Microsoft's attempt to get the gaming console into the Indian houses. If you take a look the Sony Playstation has been here in India since quite some time, but Sony never marketed it like Microsoft is doing (I hope you have seen the Akshay Kumar/Yuvray Singh ad). I had the opportunity of using the X-Box 360 recently in one of the many shops they were being demo-ed. So what is it like?
Not good!
I think the console is over-hyped. People come in already believing that the graphics are mind-blowing. For example the guys who were before me on the demo-stall were already like "Wow! Look how cool the graphics are!!" when the initial game video was playing!! Before I go on, I would like to point out that those guys were satisfied by the video alone, because they couldn't navigate the menu to actually play the game :D
I, of course, could.
The demo consisted of the X-Box 360 console (which comes in a slim gray cabinet a la the Dell cabinet) , the X-Box 360 controller and an exquisite 27" Samsung plasma monitor. The game on demo was some racing game whose name I forget.
So after navigating the main menu and starting a new game, what do I see? Jaggies!! A whole bunch of them. The anti-aliasing was rather bad. Now I don't know whether the X-Box 360 or the game was running on a low-performance setting, but that is what I saw and if they are going to show me something like that in a demo I won't take their side >:) and will assume that it was running on full steam.
I finished the race coming 2nd, but not liking what I saw.
The only good thing is the controller. It fits in my hands nicely and gives a nice force-feedback, but again I will be frank and say that this is the first controller which I have laid my hands on (which has force-feedback) so I'm bound to like it.
X-Box 360 is priced at 24K (including the controller). The one which comes with the wireless controller is priced at 27K (which includes a 20gig hard drive) and as Rahul pointed out: "You won't be playing on a 27" plasma, but on a 21" CRT (!!), so the quality is bound to decrease further from the demo." Other than that each game title costs around 2.5 K.
So what should you do if you have already saved a bit of cash for the 360? Well... assuming you already have a PC, an AGP slot (if not a PCI-X), and some green goodies: buy a massive Nvidia graphics or ATi card and live life in peace.

Three more

So here I'm again trying to amuse my audience (if any of it remains) and myself. So what do I have this time around in my bag of goodies? Well here goes..

With terrorism on the rise how do you educate people to take preventive measures? Well .. you show them pictures and hope that they don't misinterpret things.

It had always been a childhood dream to integrate emacs into the browser, so that I would be able to edit all the text areas with the help of the razor sharp editor :) A recent discovery lets me do just that.

There are normal ways to have tea and then there are some people who like to take some effort in doing the exercise.

Among other things I'm trying to learn how to drive (ride??) a bike (as in a bike with gears, I consider all things without gears a disgrace) so that on the long run I can buy a bike, drive (ride??) it, and not be at the mercy of the Bangalore auto-wallahs (who are the biggest dipshits I have encountered and till now there have been no exceptions)

Well this makes sense

Stumbling through the weekend

Found this, tried drawing my own face, failed miserably, realized my inabilities once more, had a coffee, life is still good :)

Of course at first there was Xiao Xiao and I was impressed by that. This is again of equal caliber.

Nightly enlightenment

Just came back from a fancy diner nearby which specializes in *cough* continental food. So you get into this place with all kinds of fancy light effects, plush interiors, the odd hukka lying in the corner. Don't know if this is the correct spelling for hukka, and anyway they don't call it hukka anymore. The newer, fancier name is "Sheesha".. you know like the mirror where you can see your reflection and all. Its just like that, except that you have a pipe coming out and you can actually get flavoured smoke doing rounds of your lungs if you suck on that pipe. You can share the pippette around with your friends, because you would be crazy if you could finish the hukka alone and also you would be crazy to go to a *cough* continental place alone and of all the things in the world start having a hukka... I mean what more could be wrong with you?
Anyway coming back to the previous thread of discussion, contrary to popular belief, smoking hukka doesn't make you high, of course if you are someone like Auto, then it will.
Wait! what was I talking about?
Ahh... the *cough* continental place.. yes.. So we (notice the "we", because I'm not a crazy loner like you) went in. Our ordering strategy was something like this:

1) Look hither thither.
2) Look down on the menu.
3) Randomly hit at three spots on the menu .. and thats it.

Food comes, we eat. *cough* a bit more and leave. So what did I learn out of all this?

Well.. nothing. Thanks for wasting your time.

Vista RC 1

Rahul, having nothing else to do, downloaded Windows Vista RC 1 and has been generous enough to post some screenshots on his flickr account (which I have conveniently lifted and posted here). Word of caution, the guy has a monster graphics card, so lesser mortals are advised against doing such stunts: